Marie Dressler Articles

Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler in Min and Bill Marie Dressler II: Silent Films, Movie Stardom How did Marie Dressler react to her newfound stardom? Marie basked in her success. She had been through enough trials in life — points when she couldn’t get a job — and so she was more than ready for fame and adoration. I think audiences loved that they could give [...]

Marie Dressler Interview: Part I Marie Dressler was very popular in vaudeville at the turn of the 20th century. Did she try to become a silent film star? She was in Tillie’s Punctured Romance with Charles Chaplin and Mabel Normand in 1914, but she doesn’t seem to have quite caught on. Why not? As told in the book, Marie was a huge star when Mack [...]

Marie Dressler: Introduction First of all, what made you decide to write a book on Marie Dressler, a performer who died in 1934? Well, she does seem to be a member of the obscurati, doesn’t she? But once I started looking at her life, I was hooked. In the early 1990s, some friends and I saw Dinner at Eight at the Crest Theater, an old [...]

Marie Dressler in Dinner at 8 It’s Oscar time. What better way to celebrate the 2008 Academy Awards than by having a q&a about the best actress Oscar winner … of 1931? (Or rather, for the period 1930-31, as the Oscars in those days covered films released in the Los Angeles area from August 1 to July 31.) And who was the best actress winner [...]